The uncomfortable truth about land disputes in Bangladesh: Insights from a household survey

Abstract

This research investigates three types of land disputes using a survey of 1050 household from 14 districts spanning across all 7 administrative division of Bangladesh. Moreover, not only we undertake a descriptive evaluation of the survey to understand the severity of land disputes within our sample, we empirically explore the role of land and household factors to understand what makes some land parcels more prone to disputes than others. Furthermore, four interesting findings emerge from our estimations. First, the base line results indicate that approximately 17.7% households had or have disputes in one of their land parcels. This means approximately one in five households in our sample is or was suffering from land dispute(s). Second, approximately half of all land parcels are maintained through un-registered documents, especially for inherited land parcels. This is remarkably low if we compare the state of land registrations to other countries. Third, households with ‘registered’ land parcels on average experience both lower pending disputes and fear of future disputes. On the whole, while we do not attribute causation to our estimates, these correlations motivate further empirical assessments, so that we can improve our understanding of the state of land disputes in Bangladesh.